Curiosity Rover Resumes Eyeing 1st Scoop of Mars Dirt

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NASA's Mars rover Curiosity will resume working with its first
scoop of Red Planet dirt today (Oct. 10) after taking a few days
off to study an odd scrap of detritus on the ground, NASA
officials said.

Curiosity scooped up the sandy soil on Sunday (Oct. 7) to test
out — and clean out — the sampling system at the end of its
7-foot (2.1 meters) robotic arm. But work with the soil was put
on hold after mission scientists noticed a
strange bright object lying near the scoop location.

The 1-ton rover took some close-up shots of the mysterious shard
on Monday (Oct. 8), allowing the team to determine that it's
likely some type of plastic wrapping material, such as the sort
that might go around a wire.

The plastic may have fallen onto Curiosity from the rover's sky
crane descent stage, which lowered the huge robot onto the
Martian surface on the night of Aug. 5, researchers said.

Curiosity's sampling system is designed to deliver bits of soil
and pulverized rock into two instruments on the rover's body
known as SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) and CheMin (Chemistry
& Mineralogy). SAM and CheMin are two of the main tools
Curiosity will use to determine if
Mars could ever have supported microbial life.

Sunday's scoop won't make it into these instruments, however, and
neither will the next scoop Curiosity snags. The first two
samples will be vibrated vigorously inside the sampling system
and then discarded, to ensure that the system is scrubbed clean
of all Earth-originating residues, researchers have said.

After finishing its activities with the first scoop, Curiosity
may take some more time to investigate the plastic material
before grabbing scoop number two, NASA officials said.

The $2.5 billion Mars rover
Curiosity landed inside the Red Planet's huge Gale Crater on
Aug. 5 and is expected to spend the next two years or more roving
about its Martian environs. The six-wheeled robot currently sits
at a spot called "Rocknest" about 1,300 feet (400 meters) from
its landing site as the crow flies.